Piracy Bounty? New Google Ads Target Online Piracy

Well, this is one way to get revenues juiced. If you are among the legion of people whose Google search queries include ‘free,’ ‘download’ or ‘watch’ followed by a movie, TV show or artist name, prepare for some new ads. Google is out to combat online piracy by introducing a new ad block for certain queries.

In the company’s new report on ‘How Google Fights Piracy’ details the search giant’s efforts to curtail online piracy. In addition to the new ad block, the company is rolling out a search algorithm change to down rank piracy sites.

The deluge of copyright takedown requests have exploded to 224 million in 2013. How pervasive is online piracy? Today the company receives more requests in a single week than in the years 1998-2012 combined. Sounds terrible, but Google isn’t one to turn down a revenue opportunity. Can it downrank spammers? Sure, but they come up with new tactics.

So, how do you combat someone searching ‘download expendables’? Place a new ad size in top of the search results. Then make companies pay for the placement. Well done Google.

They detailed the results of searching for ‘download expendables’.

“For example, the query ‘expendables download’ returns an ad format at the top of the page advertising Google Play, Vudu, and Amazon,” the new piracy report said. “The same ad format triggers on queries for queries like ‘expendables torrent.’ While relatively few users search in this way compared to root queries like ‘expendables,’ we are happy that these new ad formats are driving traffic to legitimate sources of media.”

Maybe they can turn Google Translate on for Stallone in the third Expendables. Show of hands if you understood 50% of what he said in the movie. Guess we know a new side effect of too much HGH.

With the new ad formats, Google insists that a majority of queries return legitimate sites. Take Katy Perry for example. Her name is searched 200,000 times more than ‘free Katy Perry mp3.’ Google is now issuing challenges to the grey hats of the SEO community. Outrank legitimate sites for ‘Katy Perry’.

As for the Google slap coming? “In August 2012 we first announced that we would downrank sites for which we received a large number of valid DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notices,” said Katherine Oyama, Google’s senior counsel on copyright policy. “We’ve now refined the signal in ways we expect to visibly affect the rankings of some of the most notorious sites.”